Peanut butter, the new weapon to fight world hunger?

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are lauding
fortified peanut butter as a potential saviour for the world's
malnourished children.

The research team has spent several years researching the use of
the enriched peanut-butter mixture, called Ready-to-Use Therapeutic
Food (RUTF), with small groups of malnourished young children in
Malawi. Their findings, published in July's Maternal and Child
Nutrition​, showed an 89 percent recovery rate in severely
malnourished children given RUTF at home.
Providing easily accessible aids to curbing severe malnutrition
could not only save millions of lives every year but also overcome
an initial hurdle in many children's lives that has a far-reaching
socio-economic impact.
"Mothers in Malawi know that malnutrition is the single biggest
threat to their children's existence,"​ said Dr. Mark Manary,
co-author in the study as well as professor of pediatrics and an
emergency pediatrician at St. Louis Children's Hospital.
In developing countries, one in four children - approximately 146
million - are underweight, according to UNICEF figures. Every year,
10.9 million children under the age of five die in the same
countries and malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60
percent of these deaths.
The RUTF mixture contains peanuts, powdered milk, oil, sugar, and
added vitamins and minerals. For the project, the food was produced
in a Malawian factory and donated to the project through funding
from UNICEF and the World Food Programme.
As part of the three-year project, village health aides identified
severely and moderately malnourished children based on World Health
Organization guidelines and then gave the peanut butter to the
mothers of those children to give to them at home.
The village aides followed up with the participants every other
week for up to eight weeks. Of the 2,131 severely malnourished
children treated with the mixture, 89 percent recovered, and of the
806 moderately malnourished children, 85 percent recovered.
"The peanut-butter feeding has been a quantum leap in feeding
malnourished children in Africa,"​ said Manary. "The
recovery rates are a remarkable improvement from standard
therapy." ​ ​While the researchers had
previously seen positive resulting using the peanut butter for
malnutrition, it did not have the opportunity to use it on a
large-scale feeding program until recently.
"What's really exciting to me is that we've demonstrated that
we can put this research into practice on a large scale, it can
benefit tens of thousands of kids, and there are not going to be
operational barriers in some very remote settings like sub-Saharan
Africa,"​ said Manary.
In 2001, he founded a non-profit organization, the Peanut Butter
Project, which produces approximately 300 tons of the RUTF in
Malawi each year.
Combating malnutrition through a non-medical method can be
important given the lack of on-site medical personnel in many
areas. The research team found that the peanut butter feeding
program and the involvement of village aides accomplished the
task.
The recovery rate for children given standard therapy is less
than 50 percent, they said.
The results of the project point to the potential for dietary
supplement and functional food companies to get involved in
development projects.
NutraCea is one such company that has been leading the way in
trying to bring its stabilized rice bran ingredient to such
products and projects in developing countries. The manufacturer
developed a rice bran technology that provides a rich source of
vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.
The company has been promoting the ingredient as a means of
eradicating malnutrition around the world, through the use of what
is generally discarded as a waste product.
Source:
Linneman, Zachary et al. "A large-scale operational study of
home-based therapy with ready-to-use therapeutic food in childhood
malnutrition in Malawi." Maternal and Child Nutrition​
(2007) 3, pp. 206-215.